Monthly Archives: July 2013

I finally tried out my peppermint chocolate soap recipe today!! The recipe may need a little tweaking, but overall it was pretty successful.

I’m not going to post my exact recipe because I have spent a lot of time playing with it and making it my own, but you can use any soap recipe you like for this project!

****disclaimer: the rest of this post will contain a lot of confusing soap lingo for those who haven’t entered the (very addicting) world of soap making yet. I will post a thorough tutorial with pictures for making cold process soap in the near future so be expecting it! If you want to get started with soap making now, do an internet search for a cold process soap tutorial as there are many, many, many great instructional soap making blogs***

http://www.soapcalc.net is a great place to start if you don’t have a recipe. You can simply enter in the oils you plan on using, the water percentage you want, and what percentage you want it superfatted at. I wanted this soap to be really rich and moisturizing so I superfatted at 5%.

What specific oils you use will be determined by the recipe you follow, but I made a point to use cocoa butter as one of my oils to make it a really thick and creamy soap as well as give it a deep chocolately scent.

So once I had warmed up my oils and cooled my lye mixture down I began to blend them with my stick blender until they weren’t quite at trace yet. At that point I added in several handfuls of crushed peppermint leaves I had picked from our garden and dried.

I blended in the peppermint leaves and then added a large spoonful (probably 2 table spoons) of cocoa powder. That is when the peppermint chocolate soap turned to peppermint fudge soap. Let’s just say a little bit of cocoa goes a long way…. It wasn’t bad or anything, just a LOT of chocolate.

I poured the mixture into a mold where it will stay insulated with a fleece blanket until I cut it up tomorrow. It’ll need to cure for about a month before I use it.

So my initial observations about this recipe and what I will change next time–

Too much cocoa!! The cocoa butter already gives it a chocolatey scent, the addition of cocoa needs to be small because not only did it make the whole kitchen smell like a fudge shop, but it turned the soap almost black. I was hoping for a light brown color so that wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

Also, next time I think it would look a lot better if I layered and/or swirled with some different colors. I’m thinking it would be really pretty to reserve a portion of soap and add green soap dye to it and then pour that in with the chocolate soap for a green/brown swirl. We’ll see…

So that’s what I have been up to today! That as well as making a few batches of bath bombs and some scrubs that I will be listing on my etsy shop as soon as I have pictures!! 🙂

Thanks for reading! Tomorrow we’ll be talking about how to make easy homemade hair products to add volume to thin hair. I expect all my southern girls to show up!!

Well unfortunately I don’t have the mint chocolate soap I promised, but it’s on the agenda for tomorrow!! The past couple days have been busy, busy, busy!

I have spent the past couple days focusing on horsemanship lessons and horse training projects. So far this summer has been extremely mild with lots of cool rainy weather, SO unusual for Georgia. Unfortunately the heat is starting to come out and it is ridiculously humid, and that makes for very grouchy horses!!

We also had an unexpected visit from family early this week. It was short, but very sweet!!

I’m also brainstorming new product ideas to expand my shop. I have a few thoughts and I will share tutorials as I try out some different ideas, but I’m wondering if any of you, my lovely readers, have suggestions of products you would like to see in my shop!! Please leave me a comment with your suggestion and I will update you as I try your ideas!!

Thanks for reading, and I will be back soon with some mint chocolate soap!

Hey there my blogger friends! Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth for a bit there. Between technical difficulties and 2 more horse camps I haven’t been able to get on my blog AT ALL.

But, I have big news! As I’m sharing all my recipes and concoctions with you on my blog, I am also going to be selling my creations on Etsy for those that maybe don’t have the time or ability to do it themselves. I’m really excited about the idea of sharing my work through Etsy, so please do me a favor and check out my shop as well as sharing it with your friends!